[1] For most congregations, the business world is
unfamiliar terrain, and the very idea of any particular
business-oriented ministry may seem foreign. But since the moral
turbulence in the business world shows no signs of ebbing,
congregations may want to develop some form of ministry focused
upon the world of business. This ministry will look quite different
than the business ethics practiced elsewhere. In the media,
business ethics comes in black and white: law-breaking and
high-profile profiteering. In the corporation, business ethics
similarly reflects sharp distinctions between what is prohibited
and what is permitted. In the classroom, business ethics comes in
shades of gray, as students analyze moral tradeoffs in case
studies[1]. But in the congregation,
business ethics comes in a softer, sometimes liturgical hue. It
involves ministry of a pastoral or prophetic nature.
[2] First I will outline three practical paths of ministry
that a congregation might pursue, with no attempt to be
comprehensive. Then I will explore why it is difficult to speak
theologically in a church setting about business. I will close with
a suggestion that ministry about business be framed within the
symbol of covenant.
1. Meaning in work
[3] For many congregation members, the most important
questions related to business ethics have not to do with corporate
wrongdoing, but with finding meaning in their work. Preaching,
adult ed programs and other "ministries of meaning" can focus, in
the first instance, upon the lived experience of people within the
congregation. Of course, conditions under which people work are far
too varied for a sermon or a single class to encompass every job
with its challenges and rewards. One size of vocation will never
fit all work settings. Still, congregational members likely will be
grateful that the church simply took time to listen.
[4] Such a ministry of discerning vocation at work might pursue an
educational track: one Chicago congregation, for example, organizes
sessions where members explain and reflect upon the work that they
do. In Sunday School, children might be invited to do some
homework: to query their parents, and report back, about what they
do, and then perhaps frame it in artwork. Or such ministry might
pursue a sacramental track: one Iowa congregation designates a
Sunday where members are invited to bring forward the tools that
they work with for a moment of liturgical recognition. Here
congregations can nurture a sense of meaning at work through simple
recognition of the tasks their members carry out.
[5] The challenge of discerning meaning and vocation in
work has recently been intensified by the rising popularity of
"spirituality in the workplace." While many congregational members
are likely involved with small businesses immune to larger fads and
trends, some may be employed at corporations with programs aimed at
engaging the deepest sources of employee motivation and commitment
in service of organizational goals. A congregational setting might
provide a helpful context for members to discuss and sort out what
is of value and what is questionable in these programs: what is to
be embraced and what is to be resisted. Lake Lambert of Wartburg
College has identified the moral ambiguity in these budding
spirituality programs: on the one hand, they may inspire employees
to think and act more holistically, and they may be packaged with
generous services for employees. On the other, they also may
commodify religion and usurp control over the spiritual lives of
employees. Congregations might establish discussion groups where
members could test their experiences of workplace spirituality
against the teaching and practices of the church, so that they
might gain a firmer sense of where boundaries between work life and
spiritual life need to be drawn.
2. A ministry to whistleblowers
[6] A whistleblower is someone who uncovers serious
wrongdoing at work, and seeks to have that problem addressed.
Sheron Watkins of Enron is only the latest in a long line of men
and women with consciences who sought to call attention to issues
of fraud, safety or other hazards at work. Sometimes whistleblowers
are catapulted to fame; just as often, they are ignored,
transferred, demoted or fired from their organizations. A ministry
is needed because whistleblowers can suffer much from their
witness. They can become obsessed with their causes, fearful of
outsiders, irritable with their families, and obnoxious to their
friends. Many forfeit their marriages and become estranged from
their families and friends. Even for those individuals whose calls
for change succeed in gaining public support, the vocation of a
whistleblower can be stressful and lonely.
[7] Here congregations can provide a ministry of support. Any
congregation is likely to harbor at least one individual who at
some point sought to buck the system and spark change, no matter
how obscure. Without passing judgment on the rightness of the
whistleblower's cause, a congregation might affirm the
whistleblower's membership among the baptized, provide a
disinterested but kindly listening ear, and render concrete
assistance as needed. This ministry may be restorative, rather than
prophetic. The congregation might envisage itself as a sanctuary:
it might respond to the intense suffering of whistleblowers without
questioning their motives or actions, or taking up their cause.
Even to maintain such neutrality may be a moral challenge in a town
or city where the whistleblower's employer is a powerful
institution.
3. A ministry of prophetic vision and
action.
[8] Discernment of another sort might be cultivated in forums to
take up local and global economic issues. During the rustbelt slump
of the 1970s and 1980s, some congregations sought to cope with
layoffs, downsizings, and wholesale abandonment by businesses. They
became active in attracting government programs and business
investment to their communities. Now there are challenges of a
different kind: huge chain stores displace local businesses, or
malls drain customers away from downtown. Most recently, powerful
globalizing forces threaten to siphon investment offshore, leaving
communities high and dry. Congregations rightly feel in the grip of
vast economic currents they are powerless to deflect. How
tocope?
[9] The ancient Hebrew prophets spoke to powers of their day with
death-defying courage. These days, the benefits and costs of
tumultuous economic change are harder to disentangle. The challenge
is to figure out how globalizing economic currents might best work
to the benefit of all-and not just at home. As members of Christ's
body, we are called to extend our moral vision beyond the welfare
of our own communities, to affirm and support the struggle of God's
people everywhere to achieve higher material living standards and
more robust and participatory economies. The affluent, whether west
and north or east and south, rightly are called to cut their
consumption, while the poor are rightly encouraged to increase
theirs-within the carrying capacity of the planet. This is an
uncomfortable message to hear, although it is familiar to anyone
who experienced a hunger banquet by sitting on the floor and eating
plain rice. For one thing, it directs our attention back to the
question of what our work means, in a disturbingly powerful
way.
[10] Congregations will be doing business ethics in the
broadest circumference when they study the currents of
globalization. For this, the wider church can provide a starting
point for reflection. The Lutheran World Federation is engaged in a
prophetic analysis of the world economy. Similarly, the Division
for Church and Society developed a comprehensive vision of economic
life in its social statement "Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood
For All."[2]
Three distinct economies: force, gift and
exchange
[11] These three practical suggestions for ministry may
seem unduly ambitious. After all, it is rare that a pastor touches
on the "real world" of business in sermons, or that adult ed
sessions refer to the lived world of work. The problem is that
there is no well-beaten theological path connecting the world of
business with the world of worship. Within the parameters of
Lutheran theology, it is difficult to see what God is doing in the
business world. The basic challenge, therefore, is for
congregations to gain a concrete sense of how God is active in the
business world. The rest of this article will review three basic
economies in which we live, to propose a theological framework for
thinking about business ethics in a congregation. I will suggest
that as inheritors of Martin Luther's vision, we traditionally see
God at work in only two ways-what I will term the economy of force
and the economy of gift. I will suggest that we need to stretch our
thinking to encompass a third-the economy of exchange.
[12] First, our tradition tell us that God is at work
sustaining and protecting Creation. Here God operates through human
roles and laws in the kingdom of the world. Just as the God of
Genesis, Isaiah and Job channels the waters that enable plants and
animals to grow, so we have the vocation of designing and
sustaining the institutions of order and governance which enable
our civilizations to flourish. These institutions, to be effective,
are founded ultimately upon the power of compulsion and consent.
God endorses, in principle, the economy of force with its work of
sustaining social order in a world governed by law and
institutions. "Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then
do what is good, and you will receive its approval," counseled Paul
to the Romans[3] (13:3a). In the political
sphere, for example, we are confident God is with us in resisting
both the Scylla of tyranny and the Charybdis of anarchy. We believe
that God stands behind justice; we refuse to see evidence of God at
work where human rights are violated.
[13] Second, we see very clearly that the God revealed
through Jesus Christ rules the kingdom of the spirit, where the
good news of the Gospel liberates and shapes Christians. This is an
economy energized by not by force but by gift-the supreme gift of
God's incarnation in Jesus. The mainspring of the gift economy is
love freely offered, with no payment expected. "Give without
expectation of return," says Matthew's Jesus.[4] Gift-giving answers our
need to be generous, to live beyond ourselves in generative ways.
Like a desert flower, the gift economy blossoms with an
awe-inspiring beauty in the wake of sudden disasters, as when
thousands of volunteers poured into Ground Zero. On a more mundane
level, it is visible in the work of volunteers, those thousand
points of light who bathe the harsh realities of the world in a
softer glow of care. We find the gift economy in the oddest places.
It thrives in the cracks of rational bureaucratic structures, where
individuals find deep joy in performing acts of unrequited
kindness. More visibly, whole organizations are founded upon
gift-giving. As a result, it is relatively easy for us to have
faith in a God who is at work in the giving of gifts. We see a
direct correlation between God's care and human caring.
[14] In the economy of force, command holds sway, while in
the gift economy, love reigns. But business belongs principally to
a third economy, that of exchange. The exchange economy is that
dimension of our lives which operates on neither force nor love but
upon quid-pro-quo. In the market, we buy or barter what we need and
want. We sell our labor to organizations, and buy other labor-from
website designers, accountants and the host of other services
required for a business to flourish. Further, there are the
ordinary reciprocities of our personal and social lives, which
usually are organized more along the lines of exchange than gift.
The Johnsons had us to dinner last week; surely we will invite them
over sometime before September. Our lives would be immeasurably
poorer if we were not able to discern who owes what to whom, and to
carry out the myriad of exchanges, large and small, which weave the
fabric of our daily lives. Business is but the most thoroughly
calculated expression of the many reciprocities by which we order
our lives.
[15] But where is God active in the calculating behavior
of the exchange economy? It is not hard to see God active in the
traditional realms: the economy of force is presided over by a God
who is king, who stands at the head of all government. We know we
are to obey God, whether in compliance or defiance of earthly
government. The economy of the gift is energized by the love of
Christ; we see Christ where gifts are being given. Exchange offers
a sharp contrast to both. Unlike the economy of force, it demands
performance rather than obedience. Unlike the gift economy, it
thrives on negotiation and economizes on love, as one economist put
it. For the intensity of force and the passion of love it
substitutes cool calculation. In the market, only the desparate,
like auto dealer Jerry Lundegaard in the movie "Fargo," turn to
(illegal) force. And only the foolish let sentimental generosity
interfere with major decisions. Businesspeople may tolerate the
mushiest of decisionmaking on church councils, but when it comes
time to make decisions back in the office, their jaws tighten and
they run the numbers.
[16] Of course, these spheres should not be seen as
entirely separate from each other. Congregations intertwine
exchange, gift and even legal force in their operations. They could
not survive without the leverage that cash provides, no more than
they could survive without the energy that volunteers
contribute-any more than they could survive without the civil
security that the economy of force provides. In our individual
lives as well, the operations of these three economies are deeply
intertwined and cannot be disentangled. And so also in the business
world: company managements rely on the economy of force to back up
contracts, yet wise managers also know when to relax the strict
rules of exchange, all while employees engage in spontaneous acts
of unrequited generosity, such as when the employees of Delta
bought their company a passenger jet. Our lives deeply intermix the
operations of these three economies, and it would be impossible to
disentangle them.
Covenant as a symbol for understanding business ethics
from within the congregation
[17] What we need as a foundation for business ethics is a
symbol which embraces and includes all three economies in its
understanding of how God acts. Perhaps the best candidate is the
venerable idea of covenant. A covenant is a relationship created
and defined by a promise, and backed by efforts-divine and
creaturely-to bring that promise to fulfillment. Our covenant with
God began when God made a pledge to Noah not to destroy creation.
It was given particular shape with Abraham, and then renewed with
Isaac, Jacob, David, all of Israel, and for Christians, especially
through Jesus Christ: the promise of whole relationships with God
and with each other. To live in covenant with God and our neighbors
is to be stretched between a promise and a future which is being
fulfilled only imperfectly in the present. The faithful response is
to cling to that promise, to keep after God, never to relax our
expectation that the promise will come to pass.
[18] God's covenant established a template which then
became the form for a variety of human relationships, or "special
covenants," as the ethicist Joseph Allen calls them.[5] In the Biblical view, a
covenantal relationship has moments of coercion, moments of love,
and moments of reciprocity; the challenge is to discern the proper
ordering and relationship of these elements. Indeed, we piece
together our lives by interweaving these economies. As a society we
cannot breathe the pure oxygen of a gift economy for more than a
few days; we need the predictable cycles of exchange to give
ballast to our lives. A life lived exhaustively in the economy of
force would crush us, while a life based on nothing more than
exchange would stifle our spirits.
[19] What holds our lives together across these three
economies is the conviction that our lives are covenantal, with a
fundamental rhythm of promise and fulfilment. The covenant that
businesspeople are called to create and sustain with their
customers, suppliers, regulators and communities has a different
shape than the covenant between pastors and congregations, or
between husbands and wives. But threaded through all is the
expectation that God attends closely to the proper ordering of
these relationships as covenantal bonds. So, for example, a
congregation which chooses to engage in a joint discernment of
vocation by reflecting on the content of its members' work,
reflects the belief that God is deeply interested in whether we
construe our worklives in terms of a narrowly framed exchange, or
with elements of gift-giving as well. The congregation which
supports a whistleblower in its midst affirms that the
responsibilities of employees and business corporations to each
other are not exhausted by the commands and rules that each must
obey or the performances they exchange, but by a sense of
answerability to their host communities. And the congregation which
commits itself to a conversation about globalization recognizes
that God is moving, powerfully, to adjust the world economy to a
wider sense of interdependence and even accountability.
© July 2003
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 3, Issue 7
[1] In academic settings, "business
ethics" has a precise meaning: reflection upon what is morally good
or bad in business practice, just as medical ethics reflects upon
what is good or bad in the delivery of health care.
[2] http://www.elca.org/socialstatements/economiclife/
[3] Obedience to authorities is
commended elsewhere, of course: Eph 6:5, Tit 3:1, Col 3:22, Heb
13:17, 1 Pet 2:13, 5:5.
[4] See also Mt 10:8. The theme of
unreciprocated giving runs through the gospels. In Matthew alone,
for example, see references to rescuing the poor from want (5:42,
19:21, 25: 35, 42), receiving bread from God's hand (6:11), the
free, unreciprocated circulation of gift from God to humans (10:8,
13:12, 16:19, 16:26, 20:28), the free circulation of gift between
God and Jesus (28:18).
[5] Joseph Allen. Love and Conflict.
Nashville: Abingdon, 1984.